Tuesday, 11 November 2014

I arrived in Checheng at 5.35am on Sunday morning, as usual, and drove straight up to Minghu reservoir (明湖水庫). There I was able to take some head-on shots of the upstream face of the dam after getting into the right position. Unfortunately, the weather was grim and cold, contrary to the weather forecast.

There were a lot of wading birds there at that hour in the morning, much more than I had expected. I had planned to take more photographs of Sun Moon Lake, but by the time I had packed up (around 7.45am) it was starting to drizzle. For the kind of shots I was after this simply wouldn't do and so I decided to jump on the bike and head straight down to Douliu city in Yunlin, with the purpose of leaving the bike there in order to examine the still unfinished Hushan reservoir (湖山水庫) the following weekend. I left Minghu reservoir at sometime just before 8am, stopping in Shueili briefly to buy a fresh T-shirt to wear beneath my sweater and fleece jacket as it was cold.

The drive was much quicker than I expected it to be; I took the 131 out of Shueili which briefly merges with the 151 before opening up to provincial highway 3 which runs straight into Douliu city. I arrived just after 9am and spent a few minutes driving around the city center to get my bearings and search for good places to park the bike. Eventually I made my way over the railway tracks to the back of the train station; there is a 7-11 just down from there with an overhanging roof and... packed rows of parked scooters taking advantage of the cover. I ate breakfast at a little bistro next to the 7-11 and chatted to the staff briefly. My dilemma was whether to take an early train back to Tainan, or go on up to look at Hushan reservoir. One of the staff said that although access to the reservoir was restricted because construction was still ongoing, it was nevertheless possible to visit and take pictures on weekends. I thought this was a bit strange, but I wanted to find the reservoir anyway because it is not yet featured on google maps.

In order to find it I drove up to Linnei, the little town just north of Douliu city and asked a series of locals who each gave me directions which included reference to turning left at an unspecified 7-11, which I naturally assumed was the next 7-11 in the direction they were pointing me. Wrong. It was another 7-11 further down toward Douliu, not the one in Linnei. Nevertheless I did eventually find it, and my word the dam for Hushan reservoir is massive. The security guard stopped me at the first access road, but at the second access road, the security office was empty and I simply strolled through and began the climb up the dam. The dam is separated into a north-eastern and south-western section, each of which is a very large dam in its' own right. The south-western section was the one I climbed, and is itself further separated into multiple tiers interspersed at the mid-way point by a large horizontal section. The picture below, facing south-west, was taken on that section and gives some sense of scale...

Once I reached the crest of the dam, the truck drivers all noticed me and gave me the thumbs up as I walked around taking photographs - not once did any security person or site manager stop me. I took pictures of the open-overflow spillway crest, which is the same design as used at the two Baoshan reservoirs in Hsinchu and at Nanhua reservoir here in Tainan...

The spillway chute itself is of broadly similar dimensions to that at Nanhua reservoir, which suggests that the expected range for the rate of outward flow in cubic meters per second will also be similar.

On the right hand side of the spillway looking at the downstream face of the north-east section of the dam which is sectioned into eight tiers...

Looking directly east from the crest of the north-east section of the dam just a few meters to the north of the spillway...

Gazing north-eastwards into the quarried reservoir bed. The work currently being done is removal of all loose sediments prior to filling, though much of this removal is already complete as you can see by the massive walls and floors of exposed rock...

Further northward along the second section of the dam looking back southward toward the spillway...

The concrete structure below will be, I believe, a pressure-control point for the water delivery pipes...

Eventually, a party of hard-hat engineers drove right past me without stopping to question my presence on the dam. They drove right past me and on up to the southernmost section of the dam where there is a small, wooden pavillion housing a set of charts. I followed them on foot to take some pictures from the southern extremity of the dam looking northward...

On the walk back across the crest of the dam I took a long-lens shot of the water-diversion tunnel which will form the main water source for the reservoir...

There were other things I would have liked to have photographed but it was already after 2pm by this point and I was very hungry and tired, so I left and took the train from Douliu back to Tainan. Next week I will drive the bike all the way back down to Tainan and take a break from reservoir trips for a while - other areas of my life have suffered whilst I have been working on this almost every weekend for the past five months.